The media’s at it again: Trying to whip up public hysteria over immigration enforcement.
“President Donald Trump had pledged to target the ‘worst of the worst’ criminal offenders among the nation’s migrants,” ABC News intoned this month — yet “just 3% of recent ICE detainees had a violent felony conviction.”
The story zoomed around social media and was picked up by other outlets, many of which implied that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has somehow betrayed its focus on public safety.
But that argument rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of both immigration law and the purpose of immigration enforcement.
ABC’s statistic is real — of the 438,537 illegal immigrants detained in the administration’s first 14 months, 13,018 of them had been convicted of a crime like homicide or sexual assault in the US.
Yet its conclusion is utterly wrong, ignoring the impact of the most significant immigration law Congress has enacted in years: the Laken Riley Act.
Americans should remember why Congress passed that law.
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